Student political action has been a major and recurring feature of politics across the globe through the past century. Students have been involved in a full range of public issues, from anti-colonial movements, anti-war campaigns, civil rights and pro-democracy movements to campaigns against neoliberal policies, austerity, racism, misogyny and calls for climate change action. Yet student actions are frequently dismissed by political elites and others as ‘adolescent mischief’ or manipulation of young people by duplicitous adults. This occurs even as many working in governments, traditional media and educational organisations attempt to suppress student movements. Much of mainstream scholarly work has also deemed student politics as undeserving of intellectual attention. These three edited volumes of books help set the record straight. Written by scholars and activists from around the world, When Students Protest: Universities in the Global South is the second in a three-volume study that explores university student politics in the global south. The authors document and analyse how generations of university and college students in the Global South responded to issues such as problems in their own universities as well as standing up against violent military dictatorships, human rights abuses, oppressive poverty, foreign interference and the effects of neoliberal austerity regimes. Contributors to this this volume also reveal repeated moves by states and institutions to stigmatise and suppress student political action while highlighting how those students developed new kinds of political action further demonstrating why this rich and complex global phenomena is worthy of more attention.

This book analyses how generations of secondary and high school students in many countries have been thoughtful, committed and effective political actors, particularly over the past decade.

Student political action has been a major and recurring feature of politics across the globe throughout the past century. Students have been involved in a full range of public issues, from anti-colonial movements, anti-war campaigns, civil rights and pro-democracy movements to campaigns against neoliberal policies, austerity, racism, misogyny and calls for climate change action. Yet student protest actions are frequently dismissed by political elites and others as 'adolescent mischief' or manipulation of young people by duplicitous adults. This occurs even as many working in government, traditional media and educational organisations attempt to suppress student movements. Much of mainstream scholarly work has also deemed student politics as undeserving of intellectual attention. These three edited volumes of books help set the record straight. Written by scholars and activists from around the world, When Students Protest: Secondary and High Schools is the first of a three-volume study. The authors document and analyse how generations of secondary and high school students in many countries have been thoughtful, committed and effective political actors and especially so over the past decade. This book also reveals moves by power holders to stigmatise, repress and even criminalise student political campaigns. While these efforts were sometimes successful, this volume shows that whether responding to problems within schools, or engaging the major public issues of the day, school activists have renewed and revived the political culture of their society, while also challenging long-held age-based prejudices.

This topical new study takes a new look at the causes, course and consequences of student activism across the world since its heyday in the 1960s. It starts with analyses of some of the most familiar - and romanticised - Sixties protests themselves, in the US, France, Germany, Mexico and Great Britain. It then goes on to examine more recent, and hazardous, examples of student activism, particularly in China, Korea and Iran. Throughout, the tone is hard-headed and analytical, rather than celebratory, exploring the similarities and differences across these protests and asking what they achieved. The contributors to the volume are: Ingo Cornils; Gerard J. DeGroot; Sylvia Ellis; Sandra Hollin Flowers; Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi; Bertram M. Gordon; J. Angus Johnston; Alan R. Kluver; Donald J. Mabry; Gunter Minnerup; A.D. Moses; Frank Pieke; Julie Reuben; Barbara Tischler; Nella Van Dyke; Clare White; James L. Wood; Eric Zolov.

In 2010, young people across Britain took to the streets to defy a wave of government education cuts that slashed grants to college students and astronomically increased tuition fees. Education was no longer accessible for all, and students across the country refused to stand by silently. A well-publicized year of occupations and protests followed--ultimately, to little effect. The current government continues to threaten fresh budget cuts on higher education. What happened to the student revolt? And what can we learn from its failure? Matt Myers tells the story of that momentous year through the voices of the people involved: activists, students, university workers, and politicians. He weaves their testimonies together to create a narrative that starkly captures both the deep divisions of the movement and the intense energy generated by its players. With an extended introduction by Paul Mason, Student Revolt provides a lively, poignant oral history of the 2010 movement for today's activists, as well as a long-overdue reflection on its many lessons.

“Puts campus activism in a radical historic context.”—New York Review of Books In the post–World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, and American studies. In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.

Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Klimke shows that the cold war partnership of the American and German governments was mirrored by a coalition of rebelling counterelites, whose common political origins and opposition to the Vietnam War played a vital role in generating dissent in the United States and Europe. American protest techniques such as the "sit-in" or "teach-in" became crucial components of the main organization driving student activism in West Germany--the German Socialist Student League--and motivated American and German student activists to construct networks against global imperialism. Klimke traces the impact that Black Power and Germany's unresolved National Socialist past had on the German student movement; he investigates how U.S. government agencies, such as the State Department's Interagency Youth Committee, advised American policymakers on confrontations with student unrest abroad; and he highlights the challenges student protesters posed to cold war alliances. Exploring the catalysts of cross-pollination between student protest movements on two continents, The Other Alliance is a pioneering work of transnational history.